Boulder cycling lagging behind national trend toward diversity

'Whole bits of population' who are not involved

Jessica Banuelos, 11, smiles with excitement while listening to a safety talk by ride leader Andy Brannon during a Trips For Kids mountain bike outing on Saturday in Evergreen.
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JEREMY PAPASSO
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Before she became a mom two years ago, Casey Middle School teacher and bike club leader Catherine Powers used to scour Craigslist for cheap bikes.

Once she found one, Powers reached out to ask if the seller would consider donating the bike to the school's bike club instead. Her goal was to have as many bikes on hand as possible so that not having a bike wasn't a barrier to entry for the school's lower-income, special needs and minority populations.

A report published at the end of May by the League of American Bicyclists and the Sierra Club titled "The New Majority: Pedaling Towards Equity" finds that cycling is becoming increasingly more diverse. African Americans, Asians and Hispanics are the fastest growing groups of cyclists across the country.

In Boulder County, which is nearly 80 percent white according to the 2010 census, it's more complicated. Even in the state of Colorado, which is also majority white, some in the cycling community say it's hard to see those changes in the cycling and bike commuting communities and more needs to be done to make cycling more egalitarian here.

"The big issue for all of us in these sports that are predominately white is there's whole bits of population, whole piles and piles of potential, fantastic athletes and contributors to our sport who really just aren't involved," said Bicycle Racing Association of Colorado executive director Chris McGee.

"We would love to see that change. We're all dreamers and we want to see the sport continue to address that and to grow, and when you're not engaging the whole of your potential population, you're by definition leaving some things on the table."

Cycling's image problem

Casey Middle School in Boulder is 35 percent Latino -- and the bike club mostly reflects that, Power said. She started the club in 2008, mostly to share her love of bikes, but also to give a more diverse group of kids access to the sport she loves.

When she thought back to her days as a professional road cyclist, the lack of diversity in cycling struck her.

"It's a real deficit in the sport," she said. "It's pretty homogenous in every way --economically and racially and ethnically. It weakens the sport."

Earlier this year the League of American Bicyclists, a national organization founded in 1880 to promote bicycling, created an equity advisory council to address that lack of diversity in the bike community, said spokeswoman Carolyn Szczepanski. When putting together the report it released in May, the organization looked at bike riding statistics and found that more minorities are riding.

The study also looked at minority groups' attitudes about cycling, which overall are becoming more positive, though many minorities worry about safety while riding in traffic.

Nationally, and especially in urban areas, the faces of bike riders are changing, Szczepanski said.

"There's this notion in folks' heads of who are bicyclists," Szczepanski said. "You think of a fairly affluent, white male wearing spandex and riding an expensive bicycle with very fancy gear, and in reality that's absolutely not the case and it's changing fairly rapidly. We haven't reached racial parity at this point, but the trend is definitely that more women, more folks of color, more youth are riding."

Part of the shift can be attributed to business sense. More and more businesses are targeting minorities in marketing, advertisements and endorsements, Szczepanski said, because minorities hold more purchasing power than ever before in the United States.

The Boulder-based Outdoor Industry Association has been working with retailers and brands on how to "invite" more people to participate in an active lifestyle, said CEO Frank Hugelmeyer. Statistics released in the association's annual recreation participation report show that minority participation in all outdoor recreation activities has been mostly flat over the last five years.

But from a profit-making point of view, outdoor industry businesses need to pay attention to minorities if they want to keep making money, Hugelmeyer added.

One of the biggest barriers to entry for minorities is the lack of mentorship -- or seeing others like them -- in sports like cycling, Hugelmeyer said.

"It can be incredibly intimidating for someone to get introduced," he said. "They don't have all the gear. Maybe they're afraid of looking stupid or incompetent. No one wants to feel that way. It's not a lack of desire to be active or healthy or go outside and play. It's the lack of access and of the introduction."

Other cities like Atlanta, Pittsburgh and San Diego are home to chapters of the National Brotherhood of Cyclists or similar cycling groups for minorities to promote diversity on bikes.

Hugelmeyer said Bike to Work Day in Boulder is a start to making everyone feel included on a bike.

"If the industry celebrated its inclusivity in that way every day, we would see real gains in diversity in age, shape, fitness and ethnicity much faster," Hugelmeyer said.

Another reason why cycling hasn't reached total parity is the way individuals perceive themselves when riding, Szczepanski said.

Bike racers, for example, see cycling as a leisure activity--it's what they do in their spare time, for fun, with friends.

A bike commuter maybe doesn't identify herself as a cyclist, Szczepanski said, but rather as a person who rides her bike to get from point A to point B or to get to work to earn a living.

In some cultures, riding a bike can symbolize poverty -- you're too poor to buy a car. Or, it means your license was taken away for driving while intoxicated. Riding a bike in those communities comes with a stigma attached, said Martha Roskowski of Boulder-based Bikes Belong. In those cultures, riders often don't understand cycling hand signals or that they need a bike light at night.

The fatality rates for bicyclists is 23 percent higher for Hispanic cyclists and 30 percent higher for African American cyclists than white cyclists.

"These are not the people who are going to come to public meetings and talk about how they want better conditions for biking," said Roskowski, who attended a bicycling equity summit with six major U.S. cities in May.

It's a vicious cycle--those who might benefit from riding bikes don't identify with the cycling community and because of that, don't advocate for better biking conditions in their neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods feel -- and are -- more unsafe for cyclists, which prevents more people from riding.

Changes still coming at the local level

In Boulder and Colorado, it's harder to track whether or not cycling is becoming more diverse. The population of Boulder County became slightly less white between 2000 and 2010--79.4 percent in 2010, down from 83.6 percent in 2000. Cities and towns like Longmont, Lafayette and Superior saw sizeable increases in their minority populations, namely in their Hispanic and Asian representation.

USA Cycling spokesman Bill Kellick said the organization doesn't need to track race or ethnicity because they can tell from observation that the sport isn't diverse.

He added that a committee formed last December is currently working on gender equality within cycling, and once USA Cycling has a handle on growing the sport for women, the organization will begin "to tackle other diversity issues," Kellick said.

Boulder B-Cycle, a bike-share program which started in May 2011, doesn't yet have statistics on the race and ethnicity of its users, but 90 percent of Denver B-Cycle members are white, according to its demographics surveys.

Bicycle Racing Association of Colorado executive director Chris McGee noted the great strides cycling has made as far as diversity in the rest of the world. Athletes representing dozens of countries are riding in the Tour de France and other top pro-level races. But he's convinced more needs to be done at the state and local level to make bikes accessible to everyone.

"From that perspective, the sport is definitely changing and embracing people from all different backgrounds," McGee said. "It's going to be a while before we see the effects of all that locally."

The Bicycle Racing Association of Colorado talks about creating programs to reach out to minority groups, but McGee says his organization doesn't have the funds or the manpower to tackle a problem that big.

Right now, the association focuses on bringing more kids and juniors into the sport. They do that by encouraging race organizers to let kids ride free, finding programs that help fund bikes for kids and keeping prices low for junior camps. By eliminating some of the barriers to entry, maybe slowly they will attract a more diverse base of cyclists, McGee said.

It isn't just about racing bikes either, McGee said. Introducing someone to cycling at a young age can also mean years of exercise, healthy living and inexpensive and clean transportation.

"The more kids we have on bikes from all different backgrounds, the more kids who will stay in the sport and stay healthy," he said.

Organizations working for change

Powers, who heads the Casey Middle School bike club, gets help from Trips for Kids Denver/Boulder, a local chapter of an international nonprofit which gives underserved, culturally diverse, low-income and urban youth the chance to ride bikes.

So far, Trips for Kids Denver/Boulder has served 7,000 youth since it started nine years ago. The organization's bike ride program, earn-a-bike program and newly opened bike shop, Lucky Bikes Re-Cycler, teach kids how to ride, take care of their bikes and help get them one of their own.

"Cycling has a tendency to be one of those sports that's reserved for the elite or privileged," Trips for Kids Denver/Boulder executive director Christi Stafford said. "In terms of introducing new types of kids, it needs to be affordable to be attainable."

The Colorado High School Cycling League provided young people with $8,000 in scholarships last year, said director Kate Rau.

Since it was established in 2009, Rau said the league has made an effort to engage kids of all races, ethnic groups and economic statuses.

She pointed to the Boulder High mountain bike team. Jacobo Jimenez, a 2013 Boulder High grad and Mexican-American, hadn't been exposed to cycling before he joined the team and helped Boulder High win a state championship last fall, Rau said.

Trenton Norman, the University of Colorado Center for Multicultural Affairs interim director, talks every day with CU students about diversity on campus. In recent years, CU's minority population has stayed relatively stagnant -- between 75 and 78 percent of students on the Boulder campus are white. That has led to many conversations about racial and ethnic diversity on campus, which is a start, Norman said.

Norman, a cyclist himself, completed a seven-day bike ride across California in June to raise money for HIV and AIDS services.

Of the more than 2,000 cyclists he met, Norman said he was surprised to find an incredibly diverse group of riders. Back home in Colorado, though, Norman doesn't see a lot of people of color.

"We're out there," he said.

Norman grew up in Denver where he rode his bike around the neighborhood as a kid. He went to college in Durango, the "mountain bike capital of the world," he said, so he kept riding. Now, he rides primarily on the road.

Even though he knows both Boulder and Colorado aren't very diverse to begin with, Norman said the conversation about diversity in cycling has to go deeper.

"There's more to it than that," he said. "Numbers are important but it does make invisible the people of color in Boulder who are not participating for whatever reason."

Norman works part-time as a ski instructor during the winters, and says people still come up to him, amazed to see an African American man skiing.

Those deeply embedded stereotypes about what sports minorities play and don't play could be self-fulfilling prophecies, Norman said, and that's a problem.

"We need to have the ability to talk about what that means," he said. "From (talking about diversity) we gain better understanding, better people, better products, better business, better education, better communities."

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